I have an old Toshiba Portege PP350C-002GJP 32-bit laptop with 1GB RAMIt came with Windows XP and had stayed that way until recently when I decided to move to a more efficient OS - LinuxAfter looking around, Linux Mint won the contest so, using the Ethernet wired connection, I installed Linux Mint 13 Maya - Nate edition and I love it

Because it has only 1GB RAM, I had to sudo apt-get remove ubiquity-slideshow-mint before running the 32- bit installer, but after that, the install went fineI ran apt-get update && apt-get upgrade and all went well

Problem: I cannot get the wireless card to work and I am getting inconsistent results from the command-line entries (see below) and I am wondering if there is a hardware problem with the wireless card or if it is an install configuration error on my part. When I run

Since the script you are attempting to invoke has been converted to anUpstart job, you may also use the reload(8) utility, e.g. reload smbdRTNETLINK answers: File exists-------------------------* VI. querying nslookup google.com...Server: 192.168.1.1Address: 192.168.1.1#53

which again shows the existence of a wireless card

I have read numerous postings, some of which say that, since 2010, Linux Mint does not need to use ndiswrapper to load Windows many drivers but so far, I am tearing out my (already thin) hair trying to get it to work natively. I have read that once you initiate ndiswrapper, it then prevents any native drivers from being usable so I do not want to try this until I have exhausted the native Linux Mint options.

I think the Windows driver that was used for this card was net5211.inf and I did find this at

/usr/lib/linuxmint/mintWifi/drivers/i386/Atheros_AR5007eg/net5211.inf

so if needed, I think I know how to try using the Windows driver within ndiswrapper but do not want to go there if I can get the system working natively.

But I cannot get connected to any wireless network. The RC_DraytekWAP shown above is my wireless access point so I thought that maybe the encryption was preventing connection so I disabled all security encryption and tried to connect but no luck.

Sorry for the long and rambling post, but I have been working on this for days and cannot get it to work so wanted you to know I have tried all the obvious things I can think of.

Questions: 1) Do I need to use ndiswrapper to get the Windows drivers to work? I have the Windows drivers available if needed. - if so, can someone give me clear step-=by-step instructions on how? (I have read conflicting posts on how to do this)2) If I do NOT need to use ndiswrapper, how do I get the native Linux Mint wireless drivers to work?

Thank you in advanceRamblin

Last edited by Ramblin on Thu Jan 17, 2013 5:22 pm, edited 2 times in total.

You do not appear to have an Atheros card at all. According to lshw, your wireless network card is a PCMCIA device using the orinoco_cs driver. It will appear in lspcmcia instead of lspci as it is not a PCI device (PCMCIA chips are sometimes actually a PCI device so appearing in lspci, but yours isn't).Please post lspcmcia output.

Edit. Support for WPA protected networks is not available for some orinoco devices, and your network is WPA protected. That may be why it doesn't connect.2nd edit. You have the right firmware in your device, Agere 9.48, so WPA should work.

Registered Linux User #528502Feel free to correct me if I'm trying to write in Spanish, French or German.

I think it's indeed internal (there may not even be a slot, it could also be a soldered connection) since your lspci shows three CardBus bridges and most laptops have only one or two external slots.

Right, the card is detected, but this doesn't give us much information yet about the card, apart from its driver orinoco_cs. Could you run pccardctl ident? I was unaware that lspcmcia had such a concise output, since I don't own any PCMCIA (non-PCI) devices myself.

Registered Linux User #528502Feel free to correct me if I'm trying to write in Spanish, French or German.

I just read on http://www.linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/orinoco that only WPA with TKIP is supported by the Linux orinoco driver, and no WPA with CCMP. Your RC_DraytekWAP access point, as per iwlist scan output, only uses CCMP as opposed to the detected TRENDnet652 network which can do TKIP too. Probably you can change this in your router's configuration

Note: if you change the encryption type, you will also have to change this on all connected Windows computers. Else Windows will complain that the security settings don't match (even if the actual key or password has not changed). An easy workaround to this is deleting the network from the preferred networks, then connecting again.

If you don't manage to get the WPA encryption working, you could revert to WEP but this will make your network less secure. Or you could buy a USB dongle, or a more recent card (for the CardBus/PCMCIA slot) that does not have any problem with modern wi-fi security.

Registered Linux User #528502Feel free to correct me if I'm trying to write in Spanish, French or German.

I also looked at the Security setting on my router and it says I am set for WPA2/PSK which lists, as the encryption mode

TKIP for WPA/AES for WPA2

which leads me to believe that the setting does allow TKIP encryption

I did, in a previous test, disable ALL encryption to see if the encryption was in fact part of the problem and it did not make a difference. (So I put the encyrption back on to be safe)

I found a Linux_Orinoco driver page athttp://www.nongnu.org/orinoco/documentation/but there is some confusion if it is included OOTB or if it was deprecated back in Kernel 2.4 and with the newer Kernel in Linux Mint Maya, I am not sure if the driver will still work.

Ok, it looks like a generic Lucent Orinoco card rebranded by Toshiba, nothing special. The page you linked suggests that it could be a Mini PCI card with integrated PCI to PCMCIA bridge chip, which sounds reasonable since most old laptops use Mini PCI for the wifi card. In that case, it would be possible to swap the card for an Intel 2200 Mini PCI card for example. Then wifi would work well.

About the kernel version, this one certainly has the orinoco driver included, else you wouldn't have been able to get an iwlist or iwconfig output about this card at all.

It could be that the drivers for ancient hardware aren't maintained very good anymore.

Registered Linux User #528502Feel free to correct me if I'm trying to write in Spanish, French or German.

I am guessing this is just going to have to be logged as one of life's little mysteries.

When I click on the network icon in the taskbar, I can see 2 or 3 wireless networks in range, including my own, RC_DraytekWAP which has a full 4 bar signal strength (it should, it is sitting 6 feet from the WAP).

So that tells me the card is there and the driver is there ...

But I cannot connect.

I tried (again) temporarily eliminating all the security on my WAP- disabled encryption- disable Mac filtering- disabled WPSbut it made no difference. I can see but not connect to the WAP.

I then thought I remembered something I read in one of the Orinoco we pages that the Orinoco driver only supports Ad-hoc mode, not Infrastructure, which is the default mode of the Linux Mint connection, so I went in and edited the RC-DraytekWAP to use Ad-hoc mode. No difference.

Is there any chance the receive part of the wireless card is working but the transmit is not?

Thanks for your help. If you or anyone else comes up with some inspiration and would like to suggest fixes to test or get the existing card/driver working, please feel free. I don't want to invest in additional hardware for a 10 year-old laptop, so fixing what I have is the preferred route.

I get (the last set starting with Rate Limit ... repeats multiple times which I did not include - same content over and over again)(I started the copy after the networking information started; did you want the full dmesg from the beginning?)

Information frame lost. It could be a driver bug. You could try installing new drivers using this package: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/ ... 1-3.tar.xzAfter extracting the XZ file, go to the folder where you extracted it, right-click > Open in Terminal, then run these commands to install it:

Wow - a LOT of drivers!Question: Will the new drivers all load and take up memory/processing power or will the system just load and use the ones it needs?

Unfortunately, no change: I can see the WAP(s) but cannot connectI did remove all security and I did use infrastructure not Ad-hoc but no connnection. I thought I read that the Orinoco drivers only support Ad-hoc so I also tried Ad-hoc after the Infrastructure failed, but no difference.

I did as instructed (yes, it did take a long time for the make command)I had no errors with the make command but with the make install command, at the start and end of the process, i received some warnings which I am not sure I should have acted on or not. I did nothing more than you instructed

(I was SSH'd in as root) so if I need to go back and do anything based on the warnings, please let me know. For example, when they say "send a patch against ..." I do not know what they are talking about nor how to do it.

Here is the output from the make install

Warning:You may or may not need to update your initframfs, you should ifany of the modules installed are part of your initramfs. To addsupport for your distribution to do this automatically send apatch against ./scripts/update-initramfs. If your distribution does not require thissend a patch against the '/usr/bin/lsb_release -i -s': LinuxMinttag for your distribution to avoid this warning.

DEPMOD 3.2.0-23-genericmake[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-23-generic'Warning:You may or may not need to update your initframfs, you should ifany of the modules installed are part of your initramfs. To addsupport for your distribution to do this automatically send apatch against ./scripts/update-initramfs. If your distribution does not require thissend a patch against the '/usr/bin/lsb_release -i -s': LinuxMinttag for your distribution to avoid this warning.

Note: iwl4965 detected, we're going to disable it. If you would like to enable it later you can run: sudo iwl-load iwl4965

If you still have Windows XP, you can go to Device Manager to see which driver is loaded (name of .inf file) and then copy the folder with that name from C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore. Then you will be able to load the .inf file inside it using Windows Wireless Drivers in the menu.

If you only have an .exe installer of the driver (probably available from Toshiba's website) it may be harder to get the .inf and .sys files out of it; maybe "cabextract filename.exe" in terminal can extract the EXE file (if you open a terminal from the folder where you saved the file).

Registered Linux User #528502Feel free to correct me if I'm trying to write in Spanish, French or German.

I think if you use Windows Wireless Drivers in the menu (if it's not available, please install ndisgtk from the repository), instead of manually setting up ndiswrapper, it will be working too. Maybe you don't even need to blacklist it manually then.

If you really want to do it manually then you would need to blacklist orinoco_cs.

Registered Linux User #528502Feel free to correct me if I'm trying to write in Spanish, French or German.